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Do You Have Practical Courage?

Nobody makes Hollywood movies about characters that don’t have courage. The warrior who goes to great lengths to put himself or herself on the line for his or her brother-in-arms. The sports star who dared to take the game winning shot. The executive who bet the business on a new direction when the forces at play suggested otherwise. The doctor who is prepared to try an experimental treatment. The investor who bets against market forces and wins. These are the stories of legend and heroism. The trouble is – plenty of sports stars miss the last second shot, execs throw their companies into turbulent times with moon shots that don’t work, investors can get fired for countercyclical decisions and doctors can get sued for excessive risk-taking. How should you think about approaching your own work-life? How should you evaluate the level of “courage” you should have when making a decision that affects your career and your business?

The answer is to have “practical courage.” Practical courage involves making courageous decisions that lead to non-linear outcomes for yourself and your business but in a way that is inherently practical.

You can apply practical courage to a whole range of situations. Making practically courageous choices is really hard. The temptations are on one extreme or the other. You will have a large number of people in your life telling you that the path ahead on the courageous decision is really hard, and that one should take the easier road. You will have others who prey purely on emotion. You will hear people say “greatness comes from taking a big bet blindly, believing in yourself and just doing it.” Neither is practical courage and fighting the two polarizing forces is what practical courage involves. Ask yourself a few questions to help you make a practically courageous choice:

Do you have the unfair advantage of knowledge or facts that others don’t have? Peter Thiel calls it “the secret” in his book Zero to One. When Mark Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo!, he likely did not do it because he simply didn’t want to be acquired. He had knowledge about the potential impact of a social network that Yahoo! (and likely many Facebook stakeholders) just did not have. When Andy Grove bet Intel on the microprocessor business and away from the memory business, he knew that one was a path to commoditization and the other was a path to real growth. They could make the courageous choice because they had information that the market did not.

Can you be practical in the short term but right in the long term? Practically courageous choices often involve short-term – long-term tradeoffs. If you make a big bet on a new, more risky choice that is likely to be right in the long term in a way that can be practically pulled off in the short term you have found the zone of practical courage. The lean startup methodology that Eric Ries has talked about is inherently about practical courage. It involves rapid innovation in a clear direction, but it limits investment until early market feedback is positive. Promoting someone with high potential can be courageous. Promoting someone with high potential, but with a backup plan in case they fail is practically courageous.

Have you considered the true downside case? I thought a lot about downside when I decided to be an entrepreneur. It can be a tough decision to leave a good job and great career prospect, until you consider the downside case. I started to think of my education and my previous work experience as an “insurance policy.” I had the good fortune of enough qualifications to get a job anytime, so what’s the real downside case of taking a bit of risk?

Being practical is a path to incremental improvements over the status quo. Being courageous without practicality is like betting at the Casino. But practical courage can give you a truly unfair advantage on a path to tremendous success. Developing an intuition for practical courage is not a science. It is an art, and one that the best leaders have learned. It involves collecting a lot of data and genuinely paying attention to it. But it ultimately also involves having the inner strength to take a set of data points that are inherently grey and having the courage to trust your gut.